Samsung Is Not the One Manufacturing AMD’s Fiji GPU

AMD is all over the news now with its brand new Fiji GPU, which currently powers impressive graphics cards such as the R9 Fury, the R9 Nano and the R9 Fury X2. Even though we now know exactly what makes this GPU tick and how much power it can deliver, we don’t know exactly who’s manufacturing it or where. This news might be a little confusing, as AMD decided to engrave the left side of the GPU package with “Made in Korea”, which would suggest that it is being manufactured by the country’s renowned tech giant, Samsung.

Things are a bit more complicated than that, though, and the truth is that Fiji is not actually related to Samsung at all, nor is it being made in Korea. The etching in question is actually related to AMD’s partnership with SK Hynix, which supplies it with HBM memory. Looking at an image of the GPU package, we clearly see the HBM memory stacks placed on the left side, which is also where we find the Korea stamp. This means that Fiji itself is made either by Globalfoundries or TSMC, but there’s currently not enough information to confirm either theory.

It’s also worth noting that both TSMS and the Globalfoundries/Samsung alliance have access to FinFET technology that will be used to manufacture AMD’s new Zen CPU cores and Arctic Islands graphics chips next year. This means that Samsung might have a key part to play in AMD’s future production line, but we’ll just have to wait and see.